Tengah Forest Town (TFT) is a project that began as an attempt to exhaust ways to archive a forest, specifically the forest in the Tengah area that is currently being cleared for a new public housing estate. Tengah Forest has been the site of a number of artistic experiments by the artist, most of which were never fully developed into artworks. Inadvertently, these experiments now serve as a fragmented documentation of a forest is now inaccessible, and will soon entirely disappear.
Tengah Forest is the locus of several of Tang’s considerations of the purpose of nature in Singapore when balanced with the practical needs of the city-state. His research reflects how discussions of the forest’s conservation only arose when the government announced its plans to develop the area, as if the threat of the forest’s disappearance necessitated the creation of its value.
At the same time,as someone who hopes to live in the Tengah Estate in the future, Tang becomes in a sense complicit in the destruction of an environment that has been a source of artistic inspiration.
